Hostage (2001) (30 page)

'What are you doing?'

'Sending a message.'

Talley keyed the mike.

'This is Talley. I need you to call me.'

His voice echoed over the neighborhood. The officers around the perimeter glanced at him.

'If it's safe, call me.'

Talley didn't expect Rooney to call. He wasn't talking to Rooney.

Rooney's voice answered from the house.

'Fuck you!'

Ellison laughed.

'It was a good try.'

Maddox said, 'What was that about being safe?'

Talley didn't answer. He tossed the microphone into the car, then crept to the far side of the cul-de-sac, where he sat on the curb behind the patrol cars. He wanted the boy. He hoped that Thomas would understand that Talley had been asking him to call.

His phone rang almost at once.

'Talley.'

It was Sarah, sounding excited.

'Chief, it's the little boy again.'

Talley's heart raced. If Smith couldn't tell him who had his family, maybe the disks could.

'Thomas? You okay, son?'

The boy sounded calm.

'I wasn't sure you were talking to me. Is my daddy okay?'

This time Thomas sounded even more hushed than before/his voice a whisper. Talley turned up the volume on his phone, but still could barely hear him.

'He's in the hospital over in Canyon Country. What about you and your sister? Are you all right?'

'Yeah. She's not in her room anymore. They took her downstairs. I thought they were doing something bad to her, but they didn't know how to use the microwave.'

'Are you in any danger right now?'

'Uh-uh.'

Talley stared out of the cul-de-sac. The Sheriff's tactical units were in their positions behind the radio cars. Hicks and Martin would be in the command van, waiting for something to happen. Talley remembered his first day with SWAT, how a sergeant-supervisor told him that SWAT stood for Sit, Wait, and Talk. Talley's eyes welled as he fought to control his fear. He put his thoughts on the children in the house. If Talley thought either Thomas or Jennifer was in immediate mortal danger, he would launch the breach. He would launch without hesitation. He believed that they were not.

'How's your battery on that cell phone?'

'Ah, it's showing half a charge, maybe a little less. I turn it off when I'm not using it.'

'Good. Can you plug it into a charger when you're not using it?'

'Uh-uh. All the chargers are downstairs. My mom does that 'cause everyone else forgets.'

Talley worried that if the boy's battery failed, they would lose communication, but all he could do was press ahead and move fast.

'Okay, Thomas, turn it off when we're not talking and conserve as much power as possible, okay?'

'Okay.'

'Your dad has business partners. Do you know who they are?'

'Uh-uh.'

'He ever mention names?'

'I don't remember.'

'Was he working in his office today?'

'Uh-huh. He was trying to finish something because a client was coming to pick it up.'

Talley had trouble taking it to the next level, but he knew that this boy was his wife's and daughter's only chance.

'Thomas, I need your help with something. It might be easy or it might be dangerous. If you think those guys in there could find out and hurt you, then I don't want you to do it, okay?'

'Sure!'

The boy was excited. He was a boy. He didn't understand risk.

'Your dad has a couple of computer disks. I'm not sure, but they're probably on his desk or in his briefcase. He was probably working with them today. They're called Zip disks. You know what that is?'

Thomas made a derisive snort.

'I've had a Zip drive for years, Chief. Jeez. Zip disks are big and thick. They hold more information than regular disks.'

'These disks are labeled disk one and disk two. When you're downstairs in the office again, could you get to your dad's desk? Could you find those disks and try to see whose files they are?'

'No, they wouldn't let me go to the desk. Dennis makes me sit on the floor.'

The slim hope that Talley had felt only moments before withered. Then Thomas went on.

'But I might be able to sneak into the office if they're not around. Then I could just swipe the disks and open them on my computer up here in my room.'

'I thought they locked you in your room.'

'They do, but I can get out.'

'You can?'

Talley listened as Thomas described being able to move through the crawl space in the eaves and attic, and how he was able to emerge in different parts of the house through access hatches.

'Thomas, could you get to his office that way, through the crawl space?'

'Not into his office, but I can get into the den. There's a service door in the wine cellar behind the bar. It's right across from my dad's office. My mom says she can always tell when he sneaks across one time too many.'

Talley's hope surfaced again, but it was dampened by the knowledge that he could not allow this child to risk his life.

'That sounds too dangerous.'

'It won't be if they don't see me. Mars spends most of his time in the office, but Kevin is back by the French doors. Dennis walks around a lot. He stays in the safety room sometimes, the one where all the monitors are. But once I'm in the den, all I have to do is sneak across the entry and go to my dad's desk. That wouldn't take any time at all.'

Talley thought it through, trying not to let the need he felt cloud his judgment. He would have to get all three subjects away from that area of the house. He would have to blind the cameras in case one or all of the subjects were in the safety room with the monitors.

'If I could get Rooney and the others away from the office, do you think you could get the disks without being caught?'

'No problemo.'

'Could you do it in the dark?'

'I do stuff like that almost every night.'

Thomas laughed when he said it. Talley didn't laugh. He was supposed to help this child; now he wanted this child to help him. He felt as much a hostage as Thomas or Jane, and hoped that he could forgive himself for what he was about to do.

'All right, son. Let's figure this out.'

The night air was so clear that the houses and cars and cops in the street all seemed etched in glass. House lights, street lamps, and the red flares of cigarettes were hard sharp points of glare; overhead, the helicopters floated against the star field like nighthawks balanced on the sky, waiting for something to die. Talley checked his watch and knew the Watchman would call again soon. Thomas was still up in his room and the sister was still cooking, but that could change at any moment. Talley didn't have much time.

Talley found Jorgenson and brought him to the Department of Water and Power truck. The DWP technician, a young guy with a shaved head and a braided chin beard, was stretched across the bench seat of his truck, sleeping. Talley shook his foot.

'Can you cut the power to the house?'

The service tech rubbed at his face, blotchy with sleep.

'I could do that, yeah. Good to go.'

'Not now. You turn it off, that means all the power in the house goes off, not just in part of the house?'

Talley couldn't afford a mistake, and neither could Thomas.

The tech slid out of his truck. The manhole was open. A short aluminum fence circled it as a warning.

'Not just the one house, the entire cul-de-sac. I control the branch line from here. I cut the juice, it's all going dead. If I set up there in the cul-de-sac I could cut it just to a single house, but they told me out here.'

'Out here is fine. How long does that take, to cut the power?'

'On-off, like flipping a switch.'

'The phones won't be affected?'

'I got nothin' to do with that.'

Talley left Jorgenson with the technician, then radioed Martin to have Hicks and Maddox meet him at the command van. Martin answered stiffly.

'Listen, I appreciate that you talked Rooney into releasing Mr. Smith, but then you walked away without a word. You want command, you have to stay available. We might have needed to clear an action, but you weren't here.'

Talley felt defensive, but also resentful that she was calling him on this and wasting time.

'I didn't walk away. I was with Maddox and Ellison, and then I made some calls.'

He didn't tell her that he had spoken with Thomas.

'You have command of this action, but please don't try any more stunts without including me in the loop. If you want my cooperation, then you have to keep me informed.'

'What are you talking about?'

'I heard you on the public address, ordering Rooney to call you. That's why we have negotiators.'

'Maddox was right beside me.'

'He claims you did that without consulting him.'

'Can we talk about this later, Captain? Right now I want to deal with Rooney.'

Martin agreed to have Hicks and Maddox meet him in the command van. When Talley arrived, he still did not tell them that he had spoken with Thomas again, nor the true reasons for everything he was about to do.

'We know that Rooney is sensitive to the perimeter. I want to cut the power to the house, then shake him up with a Starflash to make him start talking.'

A Starflash was a shotgun-fired grenade built of seven to twelve submunitions that exploded like a string of powerful firecrackers. It was used to disorient armed subjects during a breach.

Hicks crossed his arms.

'You're going to fire into the house with the gas in there?'

'No, outside. We need to get his attention. The last time I pushed the perimeter, we didn't have to call him because he called us.'

Martin glanced at Maddox. Maddox nodded. So did Hicks.

Martin shrugged, then looked back at Talley.

'I guess you're in command.'

They were on.

Thomas listened at his door. The hall was quiet. He edged back along the walls to his closet, and then into the crawl space. He stopped to listen at each vent. Jennifer was still in the kitchen, but he couldn't hear anyone else. All he needed was a laugh or cough or sneeze to fix their locations, but he heard nothing.

Thomas's house was shaped like a short, wide U with the wide base of it facing the cul-de-sac and the stubby arms reaching toward the pool. Most of the crawl space followed the inside of the U except for a branch into a dead space above the wine cellar. Thomas had always thought it weird that they called it a cellar when it was just a little room behind the bar in the den.

It wasn't easy to reach. The wine cellar had its own air-conditioning system, a single compressor that hung in the dead space, suspended from the rafters by four chains and filling the crawl space with its width. Thomas had to wiggle under the compressor to reach the hatch on the far side; there was no way around. Thomas had squeezed under it before, but not often, and he was smaller then. He lay on his back and inched under. Flat like that, his nose still scraped the compressor's smooth flat bottom. It smelled damp.

When he reached the hatch side of the compressor he was wet with sweat. The dust that covered him turned to slick mud. It had taken a lot longer to get under it than he thought.

Thomas listened at the access hatch. After a few seconds, he slowly lifted the hatch. The wine cellar was empty and dark. It was a long narrow room lined with floor-to-ceiling wine racks, kept at a chilly fifty-two degrees. Thomas clicked on his flashlight, wedged it in the rack against one of the bottles, then turned himself around to dangle his feet and feel for footing. In a few moments he had reached the floor.

He eased open the door. The den beyond was bright with light. He could hear the TV in his father's office across the hall and Jennifer in the kitchen. He heard a male voice, but he couldn't tell if it was Dennis or Mars; he was pretty sure it wasn't Kevin.

The den was a cozy, wood-paneled room that his father used for business meetings and smoking cigars. Two dark leather couches faced each other across a coffee table, and the shelves were filled with books that his dad liked to read for fun, old books about hunting in Africa and science fiction novels that his father told him were worth a lot of money to collectors. A bar lined by four leather stools filled one side of the room. It was the one room in the house where Thomas's mom let his father smoke, though she made him close the doors when he had the stogies fired up. Thomas's father liked calling them 'stogies.' It made him smile.

All Thomas had to do to reach the office was cross the den to the double doors, then run across the hall. To his right would be the front door; to his left, the entry hall that led to the kitchen and back of the house.

Thomas took out his cell phone and turned it on.